Jan 31 2008, 3:48 am
In response to DeployTheMoth
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Danial.Beta
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Heh, something about those Sonic cups. I set one down in a cupholder with a pen in it once. Fortunately it only had ice in it.
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Actually, Amazon's MP3 store gives 256kbps MP3s which is pretty good. I doubt many people can really tell the difference. And a big problem with piracy is you can get CD quality sound out of it. New albums are often uploaded in FLAC or other lossless compression.
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Soccerguy13 wrote:
With most people, yes. But with me, I like owning a real hard copy. I used to be this way with video games, until I realized how easy it is to deal with the digital copies. Now I buy games through Steam first, if I can. It's all really simple and I can still show off my "box collection" to all my friends on Steam, and anyone else, really. I never was one for music though. I listen to it but almost always as background noise only. So I have never felt the urge to buy a hard copy of a CD. The downside of buying online music is that you can't get replacement files if you lose them, so that's kinda annoying. I guess the same can be said of CDs though. I keep all my music backed up on at least three drives(PC, DVR/Server, iPod) so that even during a massive failure I have a backup. And the great thing about backing up to an iPod is it's off site a lot, so if anything happened I'd have all my music with me already(to be removed by a third party program because iTunes is annoying). | |
Garthor wrote:
Lummox JR wrote: I'm not saying that mindset makes anything permissable, though. My only point there is that companies claiming this represents a monetary loss are flat-out lying in these cases. No money was lost because there was none spent in vain and none to be gained. A physical item was not produced, paid for by a retailer, and summarily stolen. Ultimately this winds up being little different than someone who only reads books from the library, never buys them. To be sure, though, there are people who would have ponied up the dough for a CD but chose not to. I don't hold with that. For me, if I'm gonna want the CD I'm gonna pay for it. I'd rather have a real physical copy with lossless quality anyway. Still, arguments that this has hurt the musicians fall on deaf ears; it is clear that this has done no such thing. It's even been of benefit to the industry itself, or could be if they'd be willing to embrace new technology for a change instead of persecuting it. They freaked out at radio, too, and they pitched a hissy fit over cassettes. Both were incredible boons to the music industry that allowed it to become the bloated carrion-feeder it is today. Lummox JR | |
I saw that site quite a while ago and, since I support its cause, I nearly boasted a logo for it on my blog. I decided against it however, just because of how people might misinterpret it at some point (professionally speaking, my name is on my blog, and so if someone should try some online background check on me for a job, etc., I don't know how having an anti-establishment logo on my own personal page would come off).
Like I said, though, my "compass" is against these multinational companies and towards the free exchange of information and private property. Hiead | |
Danial.Beta wrote:
Not all artists own 34 houses and are aiming to go for a 35th(I assume you didn't mean a 35' house). I know a lot of people who were successful enough to release an album(s) and tour that now work retail. It doesn't last forever, and even when manage your profits properly it often ends with you in a position where you need to find a 'normal' job. While I disagree with the idea that me letting my friends borrow CDs is stealing the idea of just giving albums away on file sharing systems is way outside of any grey area. It's not just the artists who suffer either. While huge record labels are easy to pin up as money grubbing corporations they are still doing a job. They take music and spread it across the world. They also support the artists who make the music. How many good bands do you know who could have made it without a label to back them? We need them, and they need to get paid. I think they take a much bigger slice of the pie than they should but downloading albums illegally wont make them play any fairer. I would go as far as to suggest that piracy makes that aspect worse. The larger labels are taking a bigger risk on new talent so naturally they're going to want a larger return. Before file sharing took off an okay album with one or two good tracks would see sales that reflect that. They'd sell (or not sell) enough albums that it was easy enough for the label to make a solid decision. With people deciding it's okay to just download the few tracks they like it's much harder to get an idea of whether the band did bad because they are bad or they did bad because they are just taking off. They're risking more and gaining less. Not good for anyone involved. I'm not in favour of groups going around ruining students over a few downloaded tracks, but going to the polar opposite is just as crazy. | |
PirateHead wrote:
I am *far* less likely to buy music from bands I haven't heard before, but once I get a taste for an artist's music I am likely to buy a lot of their stuff. You might be, but most people are the opposite. Once they've listened to the music for a while they move on and it's no longer worth buying the album. The value of the album decreases as you hear it more and more. What do you do with the music you don't like? Do you delete it? Do you let it sit on your PC and not listen to it? Do you still listen to it from time to time but not often enough to justify buying the album? When do you make that decision? Do you listen to it once, decide whether it's worth it, then go out and buy it (or remove it from your PC)? Do you allow yourself six plays before you have to make up your mind? It's also easy to forget that while the systems for sampling music aren't as great as simply downloading the tracks you want to hear they do exist. If you can't judge by 45 second clips, or the low quality full versions, then why not go down the record store and listen to the album there. In my mind if you need anything more than that you're just being too picky to pay for any music. | |
It is stealing. There is a huge difference between cooking hot dogs on a grill, all of what you paid for and sharing with someone, or buying a single CD, making copies of part or full albums and then giving them to people.
You paid for all those hot dogs. You didn't pay for every single copy of that song you gave away. I really wish people would stop trying to justify stealing. To be honest, even I do it, but I admit it is wrong and it is the moral equivalent of stealing. Don't try to justify yourself by saying "I couldn't afford it" or "I wouldn't have bought it anyways." If you can't afford it, you shouldn't have it, if you weren't going to buy it anyways, you didn't or shouldn't have any interest in it to begin with. When I see a movie on TV or a new game I want to play, I can tell you the first thing that dosen't come to my mind is, "By god! I have to download that right now!". I could care less if people want to steal cable TV, download music or games, or anything else. It only bugs me when people try to make excuses for it. It is stealing, it is wrong, get over it. | |
DarkView wrote:
PirateHead wrote: What do you do with the music you don't like? Do you delete it? Do you let it sit on your PC and not listen to it? Do you still listen to it from time to time but not often enough to justify buying the album? I generally delete things that suck or rarely play things that don't really fit my musical tastes in general. That applies to music I've paid for and music I've got for free, and a lot of the stuff I get for free ends up sucking. However, if I listen to 20 bands for free and only like one, that's sales for the one band that they wouldn't have got otherwise. The other 19 bands had no chance - if I had taken a chance on them and bought their album, I would have disliked it and not listened to it. In this way, allowing listening to music before buying is a pro-consumer move. As you pointed out, lots of record stores let you listen before you buy. However, that system becomes much more powerful when you spread it out across the whole internet and let the music sift through people's shuffles, get opinions from their friends, see how it sounds on their own sound system, and so on. | |
Garthor wrote:
And, of course, the essential question is, "if you wouldn't have bought it, why do you deserve it?" Perhaps there's an argument to be made that listening to the music without buying it benefits the artist... but that's not what's on their minds. What's on their minds is, "I deserve free music!" As a big corollary to what Garthor says, my primary argument against what I consider to be "non-righteous infringement" is that the people say that they wouldn't have bought it anyway, but then go obtain it anyway. The lack of finances doesn't justify relaxing your morals just because you can't afford it. The whole idea of a capitalist culture is that you spend money on the things you want. The more you want something, the more money you're willing to spend on it. The moment you decide that you really want something but you're never going to pay a cent for it is the moment you are a complete drain on the capitalist system. Hell, even in a communist system you'd be shot. Say my friend goes and buys an an Infiniti G37. I come over to his house and through advanced 29th century technology I store data on the existence and location of every atom in the vehicle. I then make an exact duplicate on my own property with the same technology (for purposes of this hypothetical situation, assume that the energy requirement to produce the G37 doesn't violate physics, but is still considerably less than the cost to mine the raw materials, machine the materials, assemble the car, and bring it to the lot). I then keep that car for myself. It's not protected by Infiniti's warranties, the VIN is suspect, and there might be microscopic defects here or there, but both cars are otherwise perfectly functional and dead sexy. Would someone consider this to be stealing? | |
Jtgibson wrote:
Say my friend goes and buys an an Infiniti G37. I come over to his house and through advanced 29th century technology I store data on the existence and location of every atom in the vehicle. I then make an exact duplicate on my own property with the same technology (for purposes of this hypothetical situation, assume that the energy requirement to produce the G37 doesn't violate physics, but is still considerably less than the cost to mine the raw materials, machine the materials, assemble the car, and bring it to the lot). I then keep that car for myself. It's not protected by Infiniti's warranties, the VIN is suspect, and there might be microscopic defects here or there, but both cars are otherwise perfectly functional and dead sexy. That's exactly what I like to get at - when you introduce rules like those, it completely changes the market dynamics, and the old business model doesn't make sense any more. The sort of morality that you associate with "stealing" is based on scarcity. However, when scarcity is banished, why should goods not be used to benefit everyone? If car replicas could be produced so cheaply, massive amounts of food could presumably also be produced cheaply on the spot, allowing for an end to hunger. Fuels and other consumables would be producible in bulk without the intensive process of extracting them from the environment. Thus, everything would become much less valuable. This happened with Aluminum: in the past, it was valued more highly than gold because it was so scarce and difficult to extract. However, later scientific advances made it trivial to extract and today it is abundant and ubiquitous. Thus, its price has dropped. So, using that analogy, let me throw this back at you: I am the owner of an aluminum extraction plant, and it costs me one million dollars to extract one pound of aluminum. However, I'm still the cheapest source available, so I dominate the world trade in aluminum. Then, you find a better, cheaper way to extract and distribute aluminum. Should I accuse you of stealing, citing an archaic law positing that since I pioneered the art of aluminum extraction, it's my sole right to be an aluminum extractor and everybody else has to license that technology from me? So, suppose I thus accuse you, and the courts support me. Now, users of the new technology have to pay me a huge fee for the use of my technology, and I turn from a producer to a litigator, going after everybody who doesn't pay my license fees. I hire squadrons of lawyers to pursue and punish the transgressors, from the major to the "miner", and instill in the public mind the idea that only I have the right to distribute these licenses and that anybody who uses an aluminum extractor without paying me is an "intellectual proeprty" thief. It's silly and absurd, just as the current system of copyright law is. It's still based on scarcity, whereas there is no scarcity in the world of digital data files. And in the hypothetical world that you suggested, I would say that making a car the way you did is absolutely not stealing, any more than baking your own bread is stealing or building your own skateboard is stealing. | |
I would add that copyright isn't entirely scarcity-based. The purpose of copyright law is noble: An author should be able to profit from their own work rather than someone else publishing it and giving no or substantially less money to the author. It's good and right that an author profit from their work.
However, copyright was always intended to be of limited term. Modern law has extended it to death of the author plus 70 years, far more generous than the +50 it had set before. Even +50 is, in my opinion, way too high. This means the public domain will never get hold of a work until it has become culturally irrelevant, and worse, that +50 was never intended to address short-lifespan media like we have today. Books can last a very very long time; film stock cannot, nor can CDs and DVDs which have a limited, albeit long, shelf life. Modern copyright law has extended the copyright period so far as to prevent many works from ever reaching the public domain. And one of the reasons the DMCA is unconstitutional is that its reverse engineering clause (which grossly overflows reasonable bounds all on its own) also ensures that whatever does reach the public domain, may do so with encryptions fully intact. The concept of corporate copyrights has been a further distortion. Copyrights were meant to protect authors, not companies. Corporately held copyrights can and should be of a much shorter duration. However the exact opposite has happened, with major companies being the driving force behind extending copyright term into the absurd. Thus, Disney gets another 20 years' reprieve with which to hoard their old productions. By any reasonable standard, the classic antics of Donald Duck should be in the public domain by now. So in a sense, the hullabaloo about copyright infringement in many ways boils down to two things. The public in general seem to have a broader definition of fair use than the law has (more recently) given them, and the public also has a viewpoint about copyright terms that suggests the ideal term is closer to what it was originally envisioned at: 14 years, period. Problem is, we keep electing clowns who don't carry this consensus out into law. Lummox JR | |
Lummox JR wrote:
The public in general seem to have a broader definition of fair use than the law has (more recently) given them, and the public also has a viewpoint about copyright terms that suggests the ideal term is closer to what it was originally envisioned at: 14 years, period. Problem is, we keep electing clowns who don't carry this consensus out into law. Speaking of which, the American Pirate Party endorses Obama, the only candidate with a strong stance on copyright law reform and network neutrality. | |
You don't need to download an album or song illegally to know if you like the music or not. There are a lot of Artists on MySpace now that will let you listen to samples or a few full songs on their page for free.
Then there is also the Walmart store, which lets you preview CDs before you buy them, by scanning them in, and listening to the music in the store. Then you have MTV and MTV2 that lets you listen to music on television. Along with the radio and several other ways to access music. Saying, you wanted to "preview" the music first is a bad excuse, just because you don't want to waste money on something you might not have liked. There are lots of ways to hear and preview music now, you can't justify piracy in that fashion. | |
MTV and radio are horrible ways to preview music. They only play the most popular songs and those are VERY rarely any good at all. I can't remember the last time I heard MTV play an indy artist, and my local stations only play them if they are from that area AND playing in the area.
Most of the others are acceptable. That being said, there are lots of cases where you can't preview an artist's music in normal ways. For example: Some artists don't offer samples of their music online, and when you plan on buying the music online, it seems silly to go to Wal-Mart to sample. But yes, you are right, rarely is sampling a good excuse for downloading songs. | |
Danial.Beta wrote:
MTV and radio are horrible ways to preview music. They only play the most popular songs and those are VERY rarely any good at all. I can't remember the last time I heard MTV play an indy artist, and my local stations only play them if they are from that area AND playing in the area. MTV has pretty much given up on playing music videos at all. The radio used to be good for music but they've gone from "top 100" top "top 40" and now many are "top 25"; even then your odds of hearing a song outside of the top 10 are abysmal. Variety used to be more common. That being said, there are lots of cases where you can't preview an artist's music in normal ways. For example: Some artists don't offer samples of their music online, and when you plan on buying the music online, it seems silly to go to Wal-Mart to sample. But yes, you are right, rarely is sampling a good excuse for downloading songs. Also it's worth mentioning that most online samples, even the samples in music stores, are 30-second (at most) clips that may not give you the gist of the song. Sometimes these are chosen at horrible points in the song so you can't really pick up what it's like. Lummox JR | |
Baladin wrote:
You don't need to download an album or song illegally to know if you like the music or not. There are a lot of Artists on MySpace . . . the Walmart store . . . MTV and MTV2 . . . radio. Here you're assuming that people are looking for "establishment" bands that have big record labels behind them, propelling them to radio, Wal-Mart, and MTV. Some people are that way, and some of them do pirate music to see whether they like it or not, but there is also a large amount of music that can be listened to for free, in full, legally, without purchase. For example, check out Magnatune, ccMixter, and Jamendo. There are many others, but those are the three I use regularly, and I'd have to Google to find the names of other ones. Listening for free is an integral part of the business plan. By allowing potential customers to check out the music, they spread their popularity. The most successful and commercial of those three is Magnatune, which does a very good business and makes a lot of money, all the while acting completely different from the big record labels. Similarly, Radiohead and other artists are experimenting with giving albums away at an optional price, or for as low as nothing. When Radiohead released an album and allowed free downloads, they made more money than they had ever made off any other album. I hope, for the sake of consumers, that an ever-increasing number of artists decide to go this route and that the artists who horde their music and allow only big record labels to distribute it continue to fail. It's no coincidence that record sales are falling worldwide: people are losing their desire to participate in the current business model. | |
Then those artists are giving away their albums by their choice, not because some cheap ass decides they don't have to pay.
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Baladin wrote:
You don't need to download an album or song illegally to know if you like the music or not. There are a lot of Artists on MySpace now that will let you listen to samples or a few full songs on their page for free. You do realize the reason music is so easily available on myspace, youtube, etc, is because of piracy;) If it hadn't been for piracy, you wouldn't be listening to your favorite tunes for free on myspace. (Why let customers pirate from you when you can get ad revenue by giving it to them for free). | |